A friend was about to take a laptop to the tip. It was slow, it ran hot, and it had reached the age where everyone assumes the answer is a new one.
It was not broken. It had been neglected, then declared out of date, and those are two different things that get treated as one.
I took it apart on the kitchen table. The fans were packed with dust. The thermal paste had gone hard. That is the grey goo between the processor and the metal block that cools it. When it dries out the heat stops getting away, so the machine slows itself down to avoid cooking. It still had the mechanical hard drive it came with, the sort with a spinning disc inside. So: a clean-out, fresh paste, a £43 MSI Spatium solid state drive from Currys and a £20 battery, then Linux, because the Windows it wanted was no longer an option.
Sixty three pounds and an evening. A replacement would have cost four or five times that, at least. It has done email, browsing and word processing ever since.
Why I am doing this
I have worked in and around IT since I started my first creative agency in Germany in the 1990s, and almost none of it was taught to me. I learned by taking things apart, and by asking people who met the question with patience rather than a sigh. I turn fifty shortly and would like to put that back.
My day job, be braver now, is looking after the digital side of small businesses. There is no shortage of demand for this, only a shortage of places to take the question.
The young get assumed to be good at this because they grew up holding a phone, which teaches you nothing about a laptop. The old get assumed to be past helping, which is insulting and untrue. Both are welcome, and so is anyone who finds it hardest to get help at all: people from disadvantaged backgrounds, people with mental health conditions, and neurodiverse people.
Yes, we are doing this at Currys
Someone will point out the obvious, so I will: a shop that sells new computers is sponsoring an event about not buying one.
I would rather have them in the room than outside it. Currys runs a repair lab in Newark handling close to three million products a year, and will take old tech off you for free recycling whether you bought it from them or not. Their service operations director puts it as “the idea that tech is disposable has gone”. Retailers change when customers ask for something different, and the asking works better from inside the shop than through the window. My thanks to them for hosting us and backing the day.
What happens on the day
Tuesday 13 October, 11am to 1pm, at Currys on Elder Gate in Milton Keynes, as part of Milton Keynes Tech Week . Most of that programme is for people who already work in technology. Ours is the one you can walk into with a laptop that will not behave and no idea what is wrong.
It looks like this. A row of tables. A laptop with its back off and its screws in a little pot so they cannot roll away. Someone sitting beside you with their hands in their lap, while yours are the ones inside the machine.
Bring a laptop or a desktop if you have one, but you do not have to: we will have machines of our own on the bench with the covers off for anyone who turns up empty-handed. We cannot repair phones or tablets, though bring your questions about them. You do the work and we show you how, so you can do it again without us.
We can help you:
- Get a slow machine back to usable speed for the price of a takeaway: more memory, a new drive, or a clean-out and fresh paste.
- Stop paying Microsoft every year for a computer you already own, with Linux and free software instead of Windows and Office.
- Replace the apps that charge you monthly with free ones that do the same job.
- Stop worrying about the wrong things online and start worrying about the two that matter.
If it is past saving, we will help you recycle it properly.
If what is stopping you is the thought of looking daft in a shop full of people who do this for a living, that is exactly who the day is for. No question is too basic, and the people who ask the basic ones are the ones who go home understanding how it works.
Nobody is selling you anything and there is nothing to pay. Places are limited, so please register at digitalrepaircafe.org .
We run it with SOFEA , the charity behind education, employability and wellbeing programmes for young people across the South Midlands and Thames Valley, and Biztech , the Milton Keynes forum that gets businesses, universities and local authorities into the same room.
The Bottom Line
Before you buy a replacement, find out what is wrong with the one you have. Usually it is dust, a tired drive, a dead battery or software that has outgrown the hardware, and all four cost less to fix than a weekly shop.
What’s Your Experience?
What is sitting unused in your house because someone told you it was too old? Tell me on Mastodon, BlueSky, LinkedIn or through social media. If your business has a cupboard of them, book a call.
